Meatless Mondays, a
movement that has legs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
It's probably no surprise that Sir Paul McCartney, a longtime
vegetarian, banned all meat from staff meals on his current world
tour. But when Mario Batali starts to push people to eat their
vegetables, you know something is happening.
The famously rotund and infamously gluttonous chef-restaurateur
is to pig what the Beatles are to rock-and-roll. Batali, a
rock-star chef if there ever was one, has changed the way Americans
eat pork, introducing us to cured lonza, guanciale and lardo, which
he once described to the New Yorker magazine as "the best song sung
in the key of pig."
And yet this month, Batali announced that he would join the
Meatless Monday campaign, a movement backed by a broad array of
public-health advocates, animal welfare activists and
environmentalists that asks carnivores to give up meat one day a
week. Each of Batali's 14 restaurants, which include the meatily
named Bar Jamon in New York and Carnevino in Las Vegas, offers two
vegetarian entrees on Mondays, highlighted with an "MM" logo.
Batali is one of the movement's latest and most high-profile
supporters. But on the vegetable front, he is hardly a pioneer.
Baltimore City Public Schools launched meatless Mondays for its
82,000 students in October. Thirty-two U.S. hospitals have signed
on to the Balanced Menu Challenge, a commitment to reduce meat
purchases by 20 percent. This spring, San Francisco's Board of
Supervisors approved a resolution calling on schools, restaurants
and stores to offer meatless options, and the state of Michigan
held a one-day "Meatout" during which residents were encouraged not
to eat meat. A host of cookbooks that feature meatless or nearly
meatless meals are either in bookstores ("The Conscious Cook," by
Tal Ronnen) or headed for the shelves ("The Meat Lover's Meatless
Cookbook," by former Washington Post blogger Kim O'Donnel).
It's enough to make the meat industry nervous. Over the past
year, lobbying groups including the American Meat Institute, the
National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the National Pork Board and
the Farm Bureau have launched a quiet campaign to try to reverse
the momentum. They have fired off missives to institutions that
embrace the call to reduce meat consumption, and they have posted
talking points for meat producers on the Internet. They are also
making a final push to ensure that the government recommendation of
two servings of meat per day remains enshrined in the new dietary
guidelines that the Department of Agriculture will release this
fall.
"When you start talking about this kind of stuff at
institutions, it sends a panic through the industry," said Tony
Geraci, the director of food service for Baltimore City Public
Schools, who received a raft of what he calls "cease and desist"
letters from meat industry lobbyists. "If Baltimore does it, then
what happens? The goal is to cut meat consumption by 15
percent."
This is not the first time the meat industry has faced a
meatless-day movement. The concept has its roots in World War I,
when the U.S. Food Administration told Americans that "Food Will
Win the War" and proclaimed Meatless Mondays and Wheatless
Wednesdays. The New York-based nonprofit group Healthy Monday
relaunched the idea in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health. It really began to take off in
2009, said the organization's president, Peggy Neu, when
institutions and restaurants started to embrace the idea. The
scheme has spread overseas. Last year, the city of Ghent in Belgium
became the first European city to endorse a meat-free day.
In response, the meat industry has stressed science. To
public-health advocates, they explain that meat is a complete
protein with essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Beans,
they note, are not. To environmentalists, they point to new research that challenges widely
publicized statistics that livestock production
creates more greenhouse gases than forms of automated
transportation. To
everyone, they underscore that Americans simply do not eat too much
meat: According to government figures, Americans consume an
average 5.3 ounces of meat per day. The current U.S. dietary
guidelines, released in 2005, recommend eating between 5.5 and 6
ounces of meat per day.
"We're scientists here. We're not going to step out of line on
the facts," said Ceci Snyder, a registered dietitian and vice
president of marketing for the National Pork Board.
With the pressure on, you might expect a multimillion-dollar
"Beef: It's What's for Dinner" kind of campaign. But although the various lobbies have produced some
consumer education materials -- the American Meat Institute has
filmed a new video about portion size for its YouTube channel, the
Meat News Network, for example -- the industry is instead targeting
institutional purchasers and policymakers. Baltimore City
Public Schools and Healthcare Without Harm, the nonprofit group
that is urging hospitals to serve less meat, have received stern
letters from industry officials. The National Pork Board is funding
a new study that maps hog producers' carbon footprints, with
numbers they hope will prove to retailers such as Wal-Mart that
pork is an environmentally friendly choice.
Lobbying for the upcoming dietary guidelines is among the most
urgent efforts. The guidelines are the basis for the USDA's food
pyramid, which recommends daily intakes for food groups including
meat, grain and dairy products. The sixth and final meeting of the
advisory committee proposing the guidelines took place May 12.
In a letter to the committee, the American Meat Institute voiced
concern that policymakers were overemphasizing plant-based food as
the foundation of a "healthy" diet for Americans. "The Carbohydrate
and Protein subcommittee appears to be actively seeking a link
between adverse health outcomes and animal proteins," the letter
stated. "AMI strongly recommends that the Committee evaluate its
data based on sound science and a scientifically based risk
assessment, not nutrition publication bias."
" 'Science or 'science-based' are code words for 'there's
something at stake here,' " said Marion Nestle, a professor of
nutrition at New York University and a frequent critic of
industrial food producers. "People eat very complicated diets. And
they know the science will never be strong enough to make
unequivocal recommendations about what people should eat."
Nestle, who served on the advisory committee in 1995, said that
the language in industry letters suggests a level of concern about
the Meatless Monday campaign, but that the industry is not truly
threatened: "There's no reason for them to raise their voice.
They've always gotten what they wanted from Washington."
In case after case, she said, policymakers have refrained from
suggesting that Americans eat less meat. A 1977 Senate select
committee led by Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) was forced to beat a
hasty retreat after it initially recommended that Americans could
cut their intake of saturated fat by reducing their consumption of
red meat and dairy products. Its revised guidelines suggested
choosing "meat, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat
intake." (McGovern, whose constituents included many cattle
ranchers, lost his seat in 1980.)
In 1992, when the USDA planned to recommend reduced meat intake
in its new Food Pyramid, the industry howled again. It created a
public-relations nightmare for the agency. Under intense media
scrutiny, the USDA could not change its recommendations. It did,
however, redesign the chart so that the two to three servings of
meat that it had suggested as a maximum serving looked like a
recommended amount.
Consumers have continued to deliver what the meat industry
wants: sales. Per-capita meat consumption in the United States has
increased by 8 percent since 1970. Even health crises, such as the
mad-cow scare, hardly affected U.S. consumption: In 1997, the year
after the disease erupted in Britain, U.S. beef consumption fell
about 2 percent. The next year, consumption returned to its
previous level. Americans remain firmly resistant to giving up
meat. An AP-NBC Universal telephone poll of 1,006 adults last
November reported that 23 percent said they would be likely to make
a special effort to give up meat as a way to protect the
environment -- well below the numbers who said they might recycle
bottles and cans or take their own shopping bags to stores. Some 46
percent of respondents said they were not likely to give up meat at
all.
Still, proponents of Meatless Monday say they are hopeful that
institutions can help lessen demand. Healthcare Without Harm, which
wants hospitals to reduce meat purchasing by 20 percent over a
12-month period, reports an average drop of 28 percent in its
four-hospital San Francisco pilot project. Baltimore City Public
Schools estimates it will buy 120,000 fewer pounds of meat per
school year by eliminating it from Monday menus.
And now there's Batali, who recently lost 45 pounds, flying the
flag for meatless Mondays. "Mario still loves meat," said Elizabeth
Meltz, the chef's director of sustainability. "But even he believes
everything should be eaten in moderation."
Don't think my cats will forgive me.
